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11/22/2005

Here is a fantastic point made by NewMexiKen: Federal minimum wage: $5.15. It’s been $5.15 since 1997. Loss of purchasing power: About 19.4%. In 1997, Congressional salaries were $133,600. If the minimum wage was raised only as much as Congressional salaries have been raised — by the Congressmen themselves; I mean there hasn’t been a big groundswell that I’ve heard to increase Congressional salaries — then the minimum wage would become $6.37 in January. And even the $5.15 minimum wage is something that had to be dragged out of the Republican Congress kicking and screaming by Clinton -- the relative loss of purchasing power began before that. But anyway. Why doesn't someone propose that every time Congress gets a "cost of living" pay increase, the minimum wage has to go up by a corresponding percentage? I suppose the perverse consequence would be that the Republicans would suddenly become believers in holding the line on Congressional pay, which in turn would make serving in Congress even more for the wealthy who don't need the salary than it is today. Still, this is something worth thinking about.

11/20/2005

While Republicans want to spend 2006 grandstanding over racial issues, Colorado Democrats want to come up with solutions to the state's problems: House and Senate Democratic leadership have several ideas for health care: lowering prescription drug costs by buying in bulk, making health insurance more affordable for small businesses by creating a government pool to help cover high claims, and subsidizing premium costs for low-income residents to encourage preventive care instead of relying on more expensive emergency treatment. The cost of employee health care is becoming a real drag on job creation and on the quality of existing jobs. I personally believe a national health care plan is the best solution, but Colorado's legislature can't make that happen. The state reinsurance pool being proposed by the Dems, especially, ought to work as a short-term fix while we wait for the transition to national health care. What's the Republican plan? Hassle brown people for ID when we try to use state services. And run it as a November ballot initiative, of course, because the point is to really just to get the "base" to the polls. After all, as Joe Stengel says, the next governor will get to make appointments to the Reapportionment Commission and maybe get to name a state Supreme Court justice or two. Update: Senator Salazar proposes a national commission to study health care reform. Are we seeing a coordinated, on-message Colorado Democratic Party?

11/18/2005

Pre-Columbian elevation assisted indigenous American female master brewers -- there is no way I could overlook this story:

An ancient brewery from a vanished empire was staffed by elite women who were selected for their beauty or nobility, a new study concludes.

. . .

The brewery, on a mountaintop in southern Peru, cranked out hundreds of gallons of beer every week. The 1,000-year-old facility was part of the Wari empire, which predated the Incas.

No Reinheitsgebot for the Wari, of course. Their beer was made of corn and Peruvian pepper-tree berries. I expect to see a clone recipe in Zymurgy any month now.

Of course, I have to take any story about archaeologists' finds with a grain of salt, even though they are trained experts and I am not, when they start trying to project their findings into modern society. There are just a whole host of cultural assumptions this information is being filtered through. For example, what to make of this:

Bits of Wari society may have carried forward even to today, says Susan deFrance, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. Modern Andean drinking culture is unlike many Western societies, in which women tend to drink less.

"There's a lot of equality in terms of how men and women drink in the highlands of Andes," deFrance said. "Women will get as rip-roaring drunk, if not more so, than men."

Maybe it is just the people I hang out with, but my reaction to this was: This is different from modern American society how? These recent finds about ancient Peruvian brewing culture are extremely interesting regardless of whether they shed light on alleged differences among modern cultures.

11/17/2005

So Colorado Republicans want to make immigration a big issue for the 2006 election. My advice to Senate President Fitz-Gerald, Speaker Romanoff and the rest of the Colorado Democratic contingent in the legislature: Don't take the bait.

The idea that "immigration will be the issue in 2006" has been pushed by Republicans angry with the Bushies' uncharacteristic moderation on the issue for so long that reporters and others ought to recognize it for what it is: just another contrived cultural wedge issue for an election year. Sure, Greg Walcher was able to close the gap on John Salazar by running TV commercials featuring shadowy brown criminals, but that was successful (and only partially so) only because Salazar is himself a brown-skinned Latino and therefore more vulnerable to race baiting.

The lesson of 2005 should be that immigration does not move votes. The attempt late in the Referendum C and D campaign to defeat C by linking it to undocumented immigration failed. So did Jerry Kilgore's attempt to use immigration as an issue in the Virginia governor's race. The lesson is that except as a way to play the race card against a Latino candidate, this issue has no traction. Also, history teaches us that immigration becomes an issue at the bottom of a recession when people are looking for scapegoats, not when Republicans out of ideas need to manufacture a boogeyman to rally people against in an election year.

Fitz-Gerald, Romanoff and the eventual Democratic candidate for governor should take the grown up route of pointing out that immigration is a federal responsibility, and keep the focus on the issue that matters most to Colorado voters: the economy.

06/08/2005

Some of you have asked how the beer I brewed back in December, but got stuck in the carboy for three months while I nursed my ski injury, turned out. The answer is it came out great! It doesn't have the snappy, fresh hop taste we usually associate with our Springlike lager. Instead, it has that thicker kind of texture, the extreme version of which is barleywine, but not nearly as alcoholic.

We didn't bottle it until March 20, so we renamed it La Añeja. The good folks at Beer at Home suggested that I just go ahead and bottle it directly without any pitching of fresh yeast, and the yeast that was in there did indeed take hold of the bottling sugar and create the normal carbonation you expect in a homebrew. I even got from them an anecdote about a ship that sunk off the coast of Great Britain in the early 1900s. When the ship was raised the salvagers discovered a load of bottle-conditioned beer that had been kept cool by the ocean water for decades. Homebrewers took the yeast from those bottles and brewed new batches with it. The moral of the story is that yeast kept at the proper temperature will stay vital.

Even though extract beers never win anything at the National Homebrewing Competition, I'm considering entering La Añeja just for the feedback. (Yes, I know that's an exaggeration, no need to e-mail me about past winners who brewed with malt extracts.) I'll keep posting on the saga of this strange batch.

06/07/2005

You could always try a movement to "draft" someone to be a Supreme Court justice. At least that's the idea of the people who have started the Draft Prado movement, which is designed to convince Bush to nominate Judge Edward C. Prado of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to the next Supreme Court vacancy. The backers of the site make a good case: Prado was a Reagan appointee to the U.S. District Court who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate when he was nominated to the Fifth Circuit by Bush in 2003. He is a Texan and so is well known to Bush. And he is at least tolerated by liberals -- TalkLeft said Prado is the most acceptable candidate on the Bush Supreme Court short list.

And of course race is an issue. As a Latino, Prado would satisfy the singleminded desire of the various "Hispanic" organizations to get someone on the high court. I continue to believe that Clinton's second biggest mistake, topped only by not intervening in Rwanda, was appointing Breyer to the Supreme Court instead of José Cabranes; if Cabranes were on the Court, Bush would have had much less of an opportunity to make mischief with his Latino appointments at all levels.

All of this support for Prado as a consensus choice, of course, means there is virtually no chance Bush will appoint him. (For one thing, he is too old to sit on the court for decades; the right wing will want another young Clarence Thomas-type candidate.) I expect Bush will repeat Clinton's political mistake, believing (as Clinton probably did) that he will get more opportunities to appoint the much-awaited First Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Maybe he will, but Supreme Court Justices are notoriously hard to predict, especially when it comes to the question of their own retirement.

06/06/2005

I don't agree with Nathan Newman's view that liberals should favor ending judicial review for constitutionality (except in the case of equal protection violations), but it is well worth checking out. I definitely do agree with him that in the case of yesterday's medical marijuana decision from the Supreme Court, it is a victory for the progressive movement that by a 6-3 margin the Court was unwilling to roll back New Deal-era decisions about the power of the federal government any further than they did in the '90s. (More on that point here.)

Newman's more general point is that liberals are better off building political majorities than hoping for the Supreme Court to issue set-in-stone decisions that supposedly enshrine good laws forever. That point holds up very well in the case of medical marijuana. The Supreme Court didn't say that the Constitution requires that marijuana be illegal, it only said that the federal laws banning possession and use apply even when the same conduct is legal under state law, as in the case of medical marijuana users in Colorado and elsewhere. All that needs to be done to change this situation is to get Congress to pass the law.

And if you say Congress would not pass the law, what you are saying is that the people can't be trusted to be educated about the benefits of medical marijuana, and that medical marijuana is so important of an issue that it is worth risking feeding the whole "Constitution in exile" movement just to get medical marijuana users out West free from the prospect of federal prosecution. But eleven states (granted, almost all in the West) have enacted medical marijuana laws. The West might be ahead of the curve on the issue but there is no reason to believe the rest of the country can't be convinced to support medical marijuana.

Now I don't blame sick people for filing a lawsuit to stop misguided federal prosecutions, even when they end up promoting one of the right's pet legal theories. But the situation going forward, at least here in Colorado, is that medical marijuana is still legal under state law, there will be no state prosecutions for that non-crime, and basically it is up to the Bush Administration to decide how heavy-handed they want to be in enforcing the federal law out in the various Western states that have legalized marijuana for medical use. So this is hardly the end of the medical marijuana movement. And if this decision helps that movement (and the related movement to end marijuana prohibition) move away from a judicial strategy and towards one designed to secure political majorities in favor of reform, it could end up being a net plus for the cause.

06/05/2005

The official veto letters have not yet been issued, but the word is out that Governor Owens will kill the two bills that would roll back the 19-century laws that give private companies eminent domain powers for construction of toll roads. This means the private Front Range Toll Road plan is alive and kicking, and homeowners populating the eastern exurbs of Denver and Colorado Springs have reason to fear that a high speed highway will tear through their area. The Front Range Toll Warriors say their plan is to get a veto-proof majority to pass those bills in next year's legislature, and of course that has to be the short term strategy.

But is that really going to work? Would-be toll road builder Ray Wells is said to have had a twenty-year relationship with the governor, and I wouldn't be surprised if he has lots of friends in the legislature as well. What if there is no veto proof majority next year?

The answer is obvious -- Toll Warriors will need to elect a Democratic governor who will sign those bills. (You don't think Marc Holtzman is a potential toll warrior, do you? Where is he getting all of those campaign donations?) But here is the hard part: We are talking about eastern El Paso County, Elbert County, and the regions far to the east of even Aurora. Places where "Democrat" is a swear word. Can the prospect of a Front Range Toll Road motivate the residents of the proposed corridor to cast votes for a Democrat? If so, then this issue could put the governor's mansion back into Democratic hands next year.

If not, then the people of the FRTR corridor best learn to like the smell of diesel exhaust.

06/03/2005

Probably my favorite style to brew at home is California Common Beer (Category 7B in the BJCP guidelines), the ale-lager hybrid style made to be brewed during cool weather in northern California. When I briefly lived in Sacramento (a Coloradan exiled at 25 feet above sea level) I left carboys of California Common to lager on the covered patio during the chilly winter months, which worked perfectly. The style hasn't caught on as much as I would like, and I blame it on the awkward name that has been slapped on the style. Because originally the style was called "steam beer," but these days "steam beer" is a registered trademark of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco -- as the company keeps reminding everyone. According to Anchor, it only "seems" that Steam was the name for the lager style brewed at the cooler end of ale temperatures in 19th-century California.

The whole tiptoeing around Anchor's appropriation of the style name has become something of a joke in the craft beer world. Odell used to brew a "Colorado Stream" beer in the style. Formerly joking that they couldn't say the style because "someone might get steamed," Flying Dog now comes out and says that its Old Scratch is brewed in the "steam-style" tradition.

I assume Flying Dog got legal advice about saying that, because Anchor is aggressive in defending its claimed intellectual property right in the "Steam" name. A Good Beer Blog notes that up in Canada, there is a long running lawsuit between Anchor Brewing and The Sleeman Brewing & Malting Co., Ltd., in which Anchor is suing for trademark infringement over "Sleeman Steam" beer and Sleeman is counterclaiming to have Anchor's trademark declared void in Canada. Note that Sleeman's website expresses no ambivalance about the origin and meaning of the word "Steam" as applied to beer.

However the Canadian trademark case comes out, I doubt the "Steam" name will ever be freed from Anchor's claim south of the 49th parallel. But Anchor Brewing might end up better off over the long haul if it let other companies use "Steam" as a style name. It might help popularize the style, and people who tried "Steam" beers from other breweries would eventually want to try Anchor, the granddaddy of all "Steam" beers.

Bonus beer blogging: Hello Fort Collins! Rocky Mountain Bullhorn readers who are visiting this site this weekend may want to check out this old beer blogging post about my visit to the New Belgium Brewery back in February 2004.

06/01/2005

Ron T from Estes Park made a pretty convincing argument in the comments to this post that the supposedly generic design on the new Colorado quarter is not Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle in the Sangre de Cristo range, but Longs Peak and Pagoda Peak, connected by the Keyboard of the Winds, in Rocky Mountain National Park right here on the Front Range. Check out this photo and see if you agree.